Golden Years

How will boomers handle retirement? Hire an expert.

A retirement coach is a cheerleader whose entire team is you.Credit Illustration by Joost Swarte

The first of the baby boomers turned sixty-five last year, making them eligible for Medicare benefits, discounts at select Taco Bells and Hallmark stores (ten per cent), and a seat on the bus. Until recently, sixty-five had been the age of retirement in this country, a milestone cemented by the Social Security Act of 1935, which picked that age not, as is commonly believed, because Congress was copying the law established by Otto von Bismarck in Germany decades earlier (in fact, his cutoff was seventy) but because that demarcation was used by many of the states’ old-age programs. Oh, and also because life expectancy, at the time, was sixty-one. In 1983, the law was modified, stipulating that by 2027 the retirement age gradually be raised to sixty-seven. Currently, full Social Security benefits kick in when one hits sixty-six. But today, considering that fifty-six per cent of workers have less than twenty-five thousand dollars in retirement savings, and that the average life expectancy of a sixty-five-year-old man and woman is eighty-two and eighty-five, respectively, can any of us really afford to call it quits?

Baby boomers are not simply delaying retirement; they are retiring retirement altogether by starting new careers. The fifty-five-year-old-and-up crowd is the only age group that is growing as a share of the workforce. Even those who have the means to chase after a merry life of shuffleboard, scrapbooking, whiskey, and golf prefer to keep working. Spending days in full-time leisure and repose no longer connotes a sense of privilege and deservingness; it means you’re unemployed.

I said that nobody was retiring these days. I didn’t say they weren’t recruiting retirement coaches to ease the transition into what the geriatricoscenti variously call the Encore Career, Recareer, New Stage Beyond Midlife, Third Age, Unretirement, Anti-Retirement, Revolving Retirement, Rewirement, Rehirement, Refirement, Re-Aspirement, Protirement, Regenopause (women only), and the phase at which you are on your next-to-last dog. This is the generation that was reared by Dr. Spock, learned to do sit-ups from Jack LaLanne, lost weight thanks to Jenny Craig, hired tutors to do the kids’ homework, and solicited closet masters to organize stuff. Do you really think they are going to figure out, all by themselves, how to put purpose into their later years?

“You can feel unmoored and bereft when you stop working,” Cameron Powell told me over the phone from Oregon. Powell, a former Justice Department lawyer, is now a success coach and the founder of two coaching Web sites. He continued, “The sense of busyness and the frenetic activity disappear, but your compulsions stay with you. The imagined time on the beach, now real, becomes a hell of ennui, and you go on a secular search for meaning.”

Guess whose job it is to accompany you on this worldly but earnest journey, sometimes in person, though more likely via telephone? Yes, your retirement coach. To wit: A cheerleader whose entire team is you. A motivational speaker who mostly listens. A therapist who doesn’t blame your mother. A friend who has no needs, except for your money.

Here’s how retirement coaching works. Let’s say you’re Christopher Columbus and you feel stuck in your life, trapped in Lisbon. You’d like to see more of the world, but how? You engage a coach. During the first couple of weekly sessions, the coach asks you questions: “Chris, if money weren’t an issue, and you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do? Allow yourself to dream.” “If you woke up tomorrow and your life was perfect, what would it look like?” “What is preventing you from reaching this goal?” “Are those tears, Chris? What do the tears want to say?” To help you clarify your goals (goals are always “clarified” in coachspeak) and assess your core values (never say “values,” always “core values”), coaches avail themselves of “tools”—what other people call games, exercises, and personality tests. (According to an estimate in “Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose, and Passion After 50,” there exist more than twenty-five hundred personality tests, a figure that must surely exceed the number of personality types.) Your coach might ask you to try one of the more popular exercises, the Wheel of Life, which will evaluate your existential balance by calling on you to rate your level of satisfaction, on a scale of one to ten, with relationships, career, personal growth, fun and enjoyment, money, and so on—each of which is represented on a pie chart that’s divided into equal sections. “So, Mr. Columbus,” your coach says, after weeks or even months of meetings, “what I’m hearing is that adventure is important to you, and so are spices from the Far East—and that you’re not afraid of scurvy.” How, then, to get an all-expense-paid voyage across the sea? The two of you devise a plan. “How’d it go, Chris? Did you reach out to Queen Isabella, as we discussed?,” your coach says during your next session. “Well, no, because I had my son’s jousting match, and then I wasn’t sure which doublet to wear to the meeting—” “What are you afraid of, Chris? What would it take to make you more motivated?”

If Columbus had been in therapy, his therapist might have focussed on whether sailing off to parts unknown is a form of running away from responsibility, and whether Queen Isabella represented his mother. Unlike many types of therapy, coaching does not presume neuroses or delve into a client’s unconscious wishes. Influenced by the humanistic and transpersonal approaches of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, as well as by the positive psychology of Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, coaching aims to help functioning adults become happier and more productive ASAP. Another difference: coaching is not covered by health insurance.

Because the coaching field is unregulated, it is hard to say how many professionals are out there, poised to goad you into being the person who you allege you want to be. The International Coach Federation estimates that there are forty-eight thousand coaches in the world. The I.C.F.’s membership has expanded more than seven hundred per cent since its founding, in 1995, perhaps because many coaches are former clients who had been on a quest for a new calling and, presumably, liked what they saw.

Prices for coaching vary. A one-hour teleclass with Forward Momentum, in which Debra DeVilbiss will teach you the “seven things you should know before you retire,” costs ten dollars (that’s less than a dollar-fifty per thing). The Coach Connection, which charges three hundred and eighty-nine dollars for six sessions, promises to answer your call “within four rings.” Steve Hardison, the 1980 winner of the United States Extemporaneous Speaking Competition, charges a hundred and fifty thousand dollars (payable up front) for a package that consists of a hundred hours’ worth of face-to-face sessions, in Phoenix, Arizona (for those arriving by private jet, his Web site lists nearby airstrips).

The father of coaching is the late Thomas J. Leonard, a financial planner (also in Phoenix), who, sensing that his clients wanted more than spreadsheets, began to focus his business on what he called “life planning.” In 1992, Leonard founded the first coaching school, Coach University, and in subsequent years started many other organizations with “coach” in the title, including the International Coach Federation, CoachVille (claims to be the largest coach network), the Graduate School of Coaching (bills itself as the most comprehensive coaching school), and Today’s Coach (the self-declared largest coaching e-zine). Somebody give that man a thesaurus!

Unless you know something I don’t, I am not retiring anytime soon. So don’t look for me on the Silver Liners softball team or in my Boca Raton back yard, building a birdhouse. Still, I was curious to speculate about what might come next (no, not there—here on earth). Laurie Lawson, who charges a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour, was the first coach I met. “The agenda is always the client’s,” Lawson said. A convivial woman in her fifties, with a pageboy hairdo, Lawson works out of her Manhattan apartment, a cozy spot adorned with plenty of plants, pillows, and porcelain figurines. Eight years ago, when Lawson was feeling a little, as she put it, “Is that all there is?” while contemplating the success of her geriatric-care-management business, she became captivated by the reality television series “Starting Over,” about a bunch of women sharing a house with a life coach. Lawson attended a promotional lecture on coaching, where she won a free session. Hooked, she enrolled in a one-year program at the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching, one of many such schools in the country. Today, Lawson is a producer and a host of Coach World TV; a co-host of the radio show “Coach Chat”; a life coach, who dedicates a quarter of her business to retirement-related issues; and she has served as the president of the New York chapter of the International Coach Federation.

“What do you want that you feel you don’t deserve?” Lawson asked me, hoping, I suppose, that we could figure out my goals and move on to steps No. 2 (setting an action plan) and 3 (providing support and vigilance). “Um, gee,” I said, “the Nobel Prize in Literature, my neighbor’s apartment, free cable.” Lawson suggested that we play Points of You, a heuristic card game (sorry, I mean “tool”) that is not unlike tarot, except that in Points of You, an Israeli import, the subject does the card selecting and the interpreting. Riffing on a few cards—among them, depictions of a walnut half, a vacuum cleaner, and a fat man—afforded me a way to discover new areas of personal anxiety.

I next visited Bernie Siegel, who works from the conference room of his apartment building in Greenwich Village. “I find that people rarely use the word ‘retirement’ today,” he said. Instead, they toss around euphemisms—“I took a package from Verizon,” say, or “I’m learning French.” Siegel, a trim fifty-six-year-old with a wide smile, thick eyebrows, and a vigorous handshake, was dressed in a polo shirt and khakis on the afternoon that I met him. A former Wall Street executive and a retired accountant, Siegel is wealthy enough to become an unemployment statistic, but he said that he’d rather spend his time—specifically, forty hours or so a month, at between two hundred and fifty and five hundred dollars an hour—sorting out the botherations of corporate leaders, professionals, and small-business owners. (“I’m an expert in the problems of perfectionists,” he said.) Siegel is hired by individuals and companies, usually for periods of three to six months, but he sometimes counsels clients for as long as a year. “Money is the No. 1 issue for anyone who is nearing retirement,” he said. “Nobody comes in to talk about how to be happier.”

Fred Block, who wrote the Seniority column in the New York Times before he took early retirement and moved to Arizona, in 2004, advises retirees to stay away from retirement coaches who are affiliated with Wall Street, particularly those peddling mutual funds. “One thing that worries me about retirement coaches,” he said, “is that they’ve bought into the lie that when you retire you need seventy to eighty per cent of your salary to live on if you don’t want to eat cat food.” Brock, the author of “Retire on Less Than You Think,” points out that, when you retire, you no longer have to save for retirement.

The Boston-based company New Directions, which caters to high-powered business executives and other professionals, nearly all of whom are fifty or older and make at least two hundred thousand dollars a year, is to retirement coaching what the Mayo Clinic is to the family doctor. Its fees run between twenty thousand and ninety thousand dollars, and, more often than not, the cost of the program is underwritten by a client’s company as part of a severance package. In the company’s offices, which have the feel of a law firm crossed with a yacht club—industrial carpet, fluorescent lights, Windsor chairs, brass clocks, models of sailboats—a team of consultants work with you for months or years, or, if you’re on the full-service plan, forever, to make sure that your coming years are meaningful. (If you are on that full-service plan, your adult children are entitled to career counselling as well.)

New Directions sees roughly a hundred new clients a year, and stays friendly with many of its twenty-seven hundred alumni, who frequently attend workshops and lectures in the offices, take part in the monthly volunteer outings to Habitat for Humanity project sites, and meet with newcomers to help them find jobs. According to Mike Jeans, the company’s president, between thirty-five and forty per cent of clients secure a new job by networking with a fellow-client or a staff member. Not all clients come seeking employment, though. Some are after advice on how to become members of a corporate board or enter the nonprofit world. Others, newly retired, may have fantasized about growing gardenias or becoming a gaucho, but their exhilaration turned to panic when they were faced with an unscripted day. “I use this analogy,” Bill Wynn, the in-house psychologist, said, describing the role he and his colleagues play. “When you walk into a dark movie theatre, at first you can’t make out anything. We are the little lights on the floor that give you guidance about where you should sit and if you want to change your seat.”

There are six consultants at New Directions; nearly all of them have worked in recruiting, management, or marketing, and half have M.B.A.s. There is also a full-time librarian to help clients research a potential employer or where to take an art-restoration class. The library, which is quite large, abounds in hope and admonishment: “Résumé Magic,” “Test-Drive Your Dream Job,” “A Simple, Decent Place to Live,” “You Are in Charge, Now What?,” “Say What You Mean, Get What You Want,” “Never Eat Alone,” “Do It!” (Most retirement coaches, it seems, have written books about retirement, although as yet there is no book with the title “How to Enjoy Your Retirement: Why Not Write a Book?”)

Also in the collection is “Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose, and Passion After 50,” written by Dave Corbett, who founded New Directions in 1986. The book expounds the company’s philosophy, and stresses the value of diversifying your life during your “extended middle age,” as you would your financial affairs. How do you strike a balance between work, recreation, humanitarianism, family, friends, and spirituality? Answer: you design a life portfolio. According to the New Directions Web site, a life portfolio “is many things. It’s a flexible life planning tool and portal to new beginnings. . . . It’s a way to integrate life’s core elements—work, family and financial needs—into a larger search for purpose and meaning. It’s an agenda for turning careers into callings.”

I spent a few days at New Directions, where the attentive staff staged a miniaturized version of their program for me to sample, the pretend objective being that I would discover a replacement career and give up writing. Before my visit, I filled out a sixteen-page questionnaire. The document is top secret, so I cannot divulge much, but I can tell you that it involved exposition of personal matters, and that it would have been easier to apply to college.

My time at New Directions can best be described as Camp Me. I met separately with three consultants and the psychologist to contemplate what makes me feel happy and accomplished, what piques my curiosity, what fires me up, lessons I’d learned from my parents and grandparents, my strengths, weaknesses, hobbies, hopes and dreams, and much more. Had I been an actual client, I would, in subsequent sessions, have taken a battery of psychological tests and appointed five colleagues to be on my “board of advisers.” Their purpose is to provide the psychologist with dirt on—I mean, outside assessments of—me. One gregarious, practical-minded consultant offered tips on interviewing (if you walk into the office of a potential employer and see five models of yachts and a trophy, you’re a fool if you don’t say a word or two about sailing), and then scribbled a series of diagrams with concentric circles to illustrate the importance of tailoring your job search to the marketplace, but also of allowing yourself to envision more fantastic career possibilities (“I’m not saying you’re going to be a circus clown, but almost,” he told me). Another consultant, an earnest type who had degrees in sociology and theology, observed that I liked to have an impact on the world (I do?) and urged me to think about other ways of fulfilling that need besides writing. A few hours later, he tracked me down to suggest that I consider journaling as a means of finding a pursuit that would give me satisfaction and joy.

The next day, I convened with my team of four for a “bridge meeting.” Ordinarily, this would take place sixty days after a client’s initial session. The meeting was led by my primary consultant, a compassionate and quick-witted dynamo whom I thought of as my homeroom teacher. If this had been a bona-fide bridge meeting, my spouse or spousal substitute would have been there, because New Directions believes that a client should not make decisions alone, and that a client’s decisions do not affect only her. My spouse and I, hypothetically, would then listen as the psychologist analyzed the standardized tests I had taken and recapitulated the remarks made by my board of advisers. (There was a box of Kleenex on a shelf.)

We, who now knew so much about me, were gathered in a sunny corner conference room for a spirited powwow about my future. What did we talk about? What do you think? Even I was getting bored with the topic when, after about an hour, somehow, perhaps because I’d said I liked to solve other people’s problems, we came up with a plan—not a life portfolio but a job notion. After quitting being a writer, I would go off to an innovation-type company, where I’d dream up new products and services. The consultants chattered about details—which company (IDEO or Landor or possibly Synectics), whom they know there (lots of people), what I should do next (they’d make some calls), how I should present myself in interviews and on paper in order to optimize my chances of getting a job (don’t worry). The practical-minded consultant drew more concentric circles, but, this time, also a funnel. We were all very excited, almost giddy, thinking about how perfectly my new métier suited me.

Later, in the office of my primary consultant, I asked whether she could fix the other parts of my life, too. “Just a moment,” she said, digging around in a drawer. “I have something that a client once gave me.” She held up a magic wand. ♦